DailyTech's hands-on with the GeForce 8800 series continues with more information about the GPU and the retail boards. The new NVIDIA graphics architecture will be fully compatible with Microsoft’s upcoming DirectX 10 API with support for shader model 4.0, and represents the company's 8th generation GPU in the GeForce family.

NVIDIA has code-named G80 based products as the GeForce 8800 series. While the 7900 and 7800 series launched with GT and GTX suffixes, G80 will do away with the GT suffix. Instead, NVIDIA has revived the GTS suffix for its second fastest graphics product—a suffix that hasn’t been used since the GeForce 2 days.

NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800GTX will be the flagship product. The core clock will be factory clocked at 575 MHz. All GeForce 8800GTX cards will be equipped with 768MB of GDDR3 memory, to be clocked at 900 MHz. The GeForce 8800GTX will also have a 384-bit memory interface and deliver 86GB/second of memory bandwidth. GeForce 8800GTX graphics cards are equipped with 128 unified shaders clocked at 1350 MHz. The theoretical texture fill-rate is around 38.4 billion pixels per second.

Slotted right below the GeForce 8800GTX is the slightly cut-down GeForce 8800GTS. These graphics cards will have a G80 GPU clocked at a slower 500 MHz. The memory configuration for GeForce 8800GTS cards slightly differ from the GeForce 8800GTX. GeForce 8800GTS cards will be equipped with 640MB of GDDR3 graphics memory clocked at 900 MHz. The memory interface is reduced to 320-bit and overall memory bandwidth is 64GB/second. There will be fewer unified shaders with GeForce 8800GTS graphics cards. 96 unified shaders clocked at 1200 MHz are available on GeForce 8800GTS graphics cards.

Additionally GeForce 8800GTX and 8800GTS products are HDCP compliant with support for dual dual-link DVI, VIVO and HDTV outputs. All cards will have dual-slot coolers too. Expect GeForce 8800GTX and 8800GTS products to launch the second week of November 2006. This will be a hard launch as most manufacturers should have boards ready now.

Yeah, this seems to be too amazing for my brain this early in the morning. I knew DX10 would bring some interesting improvements, but this is nucking futs! I am salivating, I'm not saying it to be funny. I actually dribbled on myself. I can't wait to see benchies along with the new R600. As someone else said below, I'll probably wait for a die shrink refresh before buying one...

I'm guessing (and I could well be wrong), that 128 stream processors means it can process 32 vec4, or 43-ish (well, 42 and two-thirds) vec3 instructions per clock. That would make sense to me in terms of not insanely increasing transistor count but still providing a huge boost in the flexibility of the pipeline itself.

Interesting if that's the case - moving away from an SIMD sort of approach isn't something I expected.

H..Y S..T!! this generation of GPU's will be very interesting indeed. Mix that with a four core Intel or AMD processor and future DDR2 1Ghz or DDR3 and it all combines to one serious kick a.. system. WHAT HAVE THESE PEOPLE UNLEASHED!!!!

They will have released technology that is not being utilized by the majority for the next 3-5 years. Considering how long dual cores have been out and that just recently we are seeing more mainstream support for them, it'll be a while until we see quad cores fully utilized. Especially considering that general tasks like web browsing don't scale well unlike with a specialized task like media encoding. I'm sure games will eventually support and require dual or even quad core CPU's but that day is a long long way off. Especially cosidering that developers need to try to make a game that caters to the lowest common denominator so as to try to sell as many copies as possible.

My one question is whether the 8800GTS is the exact same core as the 8800GT? If it's the same core with some shaders disabled, I'm sure it's likely some enterprising fellow will discover a hack or mod to re-enable them.

I'm also curious as to the pricing as I'm verylikely to be buying one of these cards. I normally skip a generation of video cards and currently have a X1900XT but due to a friend buying a new computer (his old gaming machine was an Athlon XP and a Radeon 9500) I'm likely in the market for a new card and selling him my old X1900XT which is still quite serviceable.

Even without the ability to mod the card for extra shader performance, if the 8800GTS is in the neighborhood of $300-380 then I'm very likely to purchase it.